Highly Irregular

I’ve written a couple of posts about tricky irregular verbs such as lead and lie/lay. Today I ran across a recent post about irregular verbs at the Language Log blog that lists some of the more confusing verbs and their proper forms alongside verbs with similar present-tense forms whose past tense forms are created differently. I pulled this table straight out of the post.

	PLAIN PRES	PRETERITE	PAST PART.
hit	hit	hit	hit
sit	sit	sat	sat
right	right	righted	righted
light	light	lit	lit
fight	fight	fought	fought
lie	lie	lay	lain
lay	lay	laid	laid
get	get	got	gotten	(got in British English)
let	let	let	let
make	make	made	made
take	take	took	taken
bring	bring	brought	brought	(brung in some non-standard dialects)
ping	ping	pinged	pinged
sing	sing	sang	sung

The “plain pres” column lists the present tense, the “preterite” lists basically the simple past tense, and the “past part” column lists the past participle, or the verb form you tend to use along with helping verbs like “had.” Note how the past tense forms of similar words like hit/sit, right/light/fight, get/let, and the other groupings differ. No wonder people have trouble keeping up with this stuff!

I found another relevant and interesting post here.